This book offers a synthetic account of the Futurist movement, founded in 1909 by the poet and impresario F.T. Marinetti.  Exasperated by Italy’s association with ancient ruins and Renaissance masterpieces – at the expense of a truly contemporary culture – Marinetti called for a radical tabula rasa.  Artistic treasures and literary canon would be sacrificed on the altar of industry, transport, technology, and military machinery.  These would constitute the raw material for radically new representations.  “We intend to destroy museums, libraries, academies of every sort,” proclaimed Marinetti in the “Founding and Manifesto of Futurism,” “to free this nation from its fetid cancer of professors, archaeologists, tour guides, and antiquarians.”  

Bearing ten chapters tracing Futurism from its origins to its dissolution in World War Two, the book attempts to implement Marinetti’s own “synthetic” imperative.  The “Very Short Introduction” naturally emulates one of Futurism’s basic creeds: condensing, compressing, and abbreviating in line with the streamlined needs of modernity – over and against the prolixity of professors, speed and synthesis!  At the same time, the volume reads many Futurist claims against themselves, examining, for instance, why Marinetti’s calls to “destroy syntax” never carried over into the movement’s numerous written tracts.  

Its chapters examine different thematic questions while also tracing the larger arc of Futurism’s chronological development, from an initial, lone manifesto to the most influential cultural phenomenon of Italy’s twentieth century.  How did a movement espousing such misogynist rhetoric come to sponsor so many women artists?  How did a decidedly nationalist project bear such widely international consequences, from Georgia to Japan, Brazil to Budapest, from the Dada movement to Afrofuturist music and cinema?  How did Futurist war-mongering, imperialist enthusiasm, and calls for aestheticized violence get transformed by subsequent avant-garde movements, adapted to more progressive designs?  The book examines these and other paradoxes, and attempts along the way to grasp the abiding significance and promise of “futurity” itself, long after the last century’s various catastrophes.